It was then that Bim felt what was, for him, a very rare sensation. He was irritated.

"I don't bovver," he said, with a cross look in the direction of his brother and sister Rochesters. "No, but, Lucy, s'pose some one—nurse s'pose—did fall down into the street and broke all her legs and arms, she wouldn't be dead would she?"

In London there are some thirty gangs of “bovver birds,” violence-prone girls who roam the streets in packs attacking almost any vulnerable object for no apparent reason other than the sheer thrill of it.